Category Archives: al Qaida al Nusra Boko Haram

Another $400 Million, Total is now $5.9 Billion to Syrians

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was providing an additional $364 million in humanitarian assistance to help Syrians caught up in the country’s civil war, bringing total U.S. humanitarian spending for Syria to about $5.9 billion.

Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Anne Richard said the funding would help provide food, shelter, safe drinking water, medical care and other support for millions of Syrian refugees and the communities that host them.

Richard told a State Department briefing about three-quarters of the additional funding would help people still inside Syria and the rest would assist Syrians who have fled the country.

She also said the United States had admitted some 85,000 refugees over the past fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That figure included about 12,500 Syrian refugees, exceeding the administration’s goal of 10,000, she said.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the push for additional humanitarian aid funds came in part because of deteriorating conditions in Aleppo after the collapse of a ceasefire sponsored by the United States and Russia.

The forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have launched a massive push against rebel-held areas of the city, where some 250,000 civilians are believed to be trapped. Intensive bombing has killed hundreds of people, many of whom died in buildings collapsed by bunker-buster bombs.

“Until the past few weeks we felt like we were on a firm path towards a possible diplomatic resolution to this. We still believe that’s possible,” Toner told a briefing.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not mindful … of the tremendous humanitarian suffering that’s going on right now in Aleppo. And that’s why we’re working so hard to ramp up our assistance,” he added.

While saying the United States continued to seek a diplomatic resolution of the problem, he left the door open to other action.

“We’ll continue to weigh all options. Those discussions are ongoing. I don’t want to rule anything out, but right now we’re focused on the diplomatic one,” Toner said.

He noted the United States has warned that failure to achieve a ceasefire could lead to an escalation of the conflict.

“We cannot dictate what other countries … may or may not decide to do in terms of supporting certain groups within Syria,” Toner said. “You may have a further deterioration on either side … and by deterioration I mean more arming and more conflict between them, and intensification of the conflict.”

****

Jeh Johnson said in a Senate hearing that the government focuses on refugees for resettlement that are good for the country. The vetting in comprehensive and some of the standards to be met by applicants are classified. The concentration is on women and children.

From the DHS website:

U.S. Expands Initiatives To Address Central American Migration Challenges

Over the past year, the United States has taken a series of steps to address the ongoing humanitarian challenges in Central America, particularly for the many vulnerable individuals attempting to leave the region and come to the United States, while also promoting safe and orderly migration and border security. As part of this ongoing effort, the United States is announcing the following initiatives to help vulnerable families and individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

World Refugee Day: #RefugeesWelcome

Secretary Johnson smiling at the camera with his arm around 11 year old Turkish refugee JaafarSeveral months ago while I was in Turkey I met a 9-year-old refugee named Jaafar.  I was immediately impressed with this extraordinary little boy who spoke almost perfect English.

Readout of Secretary Johnson’s Trip To Turkey

Secretary Johnson visits a Turkish-government run Syrian refugee camp in Adana, TurkeyToday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson concluded a three-day trip to Turkey, where he visited a refugee camp, reviewed resettlement processing, spoke to a number of Syrian and Iraqi refugee families, met with government officials in Istanbul and Ankara to discuss a range of homeland security-related issues, and signed two bilateral accords to codify mutual commitment to deepen collaboration.

Readout Of Administration Call With Law Enforcement Officials On Refugee Screening

Senior Administration officials spoke by phone today with state and local law enforcement representatives from across the country to provide information on the U.S.’s stringent refugee admissions policies and security screening measures. Officials on the call included Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas; Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Simon Henshaw; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske; and FBI National Security Branch Executive Assistant Director John Giacalone.

Written testimony of USCIS for a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest hearing titled “Oversight of the Administration’s FY 2016 Refugee Resettlement Program: Fiscal and Security Implications”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services (USCIS) Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Refugee Affairs Division Chief Barbara Strack and USCIS Fraud Detection & National Security Associate Director Matt Emrich address USCIS’s role in refugee resettlement, and the screening measures and safeguards developed by the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

7700 Terrorists at the Southern Border

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Oh….another leak and no word from the Department of Homeland Security….

Leaked FBI Data Reveal 7,700 Terrorist Encounters in USA in One Year; Border States Most Targeted

Breitbart: Leaked documents with sensitive FBI data exclusively obtained by Breitbart Texas reveal that 7,712 terrorist encounters occurred within the United States in one year and that many of those encounters occurred near the U.S.-Mexico border. The incidents are characterized as “Known or Suspected Terrorist Encounters.” Some of the encounters occurred near the U.S.-Mexico border at ports-of-entry and some occurred in between, indicating that persons known or reasonably suspected of being terrorists attempted to sneak into the U.S. across the border. In all, the encounters occurred in higher numbers in border states.

Some of the documents pertain to the entire U.S., while others focus specifically on the state of Arizona. The documents are labeled, “UNCLASSIFIED/LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE” and contain data from the FBI-administered Terrorist Screening Center, the organization maintaining the Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the “Terror Watch List.”

 CNN

The leaked FBI data are contained in a fusion center’s educational materials, specifically the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center’s (ACTIC) “Known or Suspected Terrorist (KST) Encounters Briefing” covering from July 20 2015 through July 20 2016. The leaked documents are composed of 10 individual pages, but Breitbart Texas chose to release only nine of them due to page 10 containing contact information for ACTIC.

Page Two of the documents contains a map of the entire U.S. with the numbers of encounters per state. The states with the highest encounters are all border states. Texas, California, and Arizona–all states with a shared border with Mexico–rank high in encounters.

Page Three shows a map of where the encounters occurred in the state of Arizona. The majority from this map occurred in Phoenix, a major destination point for people who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The map also shows that encounters occurred at ports-of-entry, likely from persons either walking up and asking for asylum or from Sinaloa cartel attempts to smuggle them into the U.S. in vehicles. Most significantly, the map shows that many of the encounters occurred near the border outside of ports-of-entry, indicating that persons were attempting to sneak into the U.S.

Page Six shows a pie chart indicating that the majority of encounters in Arizona were with Islamic known or suspected terrorists, both Sunni and Shi’a. Eighty-nine encounters were Sunni, 56 were Shi’a, 70 were “Other International Terrorist Groups or Affiliates,” and only 52 were with “Domestic Terrorism.”

Page 7 contains definitions to help understand the maps.

Breitbart Texas provides the leaked documents and data below: (Go here to see all pages)

Page 1 of 9 by Brandon Darby on Scribd

Related reading:

2012: Inside a secret U.S. Terrorist Screening Center

(CBS News) The Terrorist Screening Center is one of the U.S. government’s most secure buildings. It is home to the nation’s top secret terrorist databases.

For CBS to gain access, no sound could be recorded and only one agent could be identified, Tim Healy.

He is the FBI veteran who currently runs the center.

“We are the only country in the world that has a terrorist watch list.”

The center was founded in 2003 in response to the 9/11 attacks. Their job is to gather intelligence about possible terrorists both in the United States and abroad.

The watch list contains about 520,000 people world wide suspected of having ties to terrorism. Names on the list are added and subtracted daily, but who in on the list remains a secret.

“We don’t confirm anyone’s existence on the watch list,” said Healy.

In addition to the watch list, Healy oversees a second more critical list, the “No Fly List”.

“If you have information that the guy wants to blow up a plane, I can keep him off a plane,” said Healy. “If I’ve [got] information he wants to conduct a terrorist attack, I can keep him off a plane.”

There are about 20,000 people on the “No Fly List”. Seven-hundred of them are Americans and they are considered too much of a risk to allow onto an airplane.

Names on the various watch lists surface each day in calls to the center. For example, each time a police officer run someone’s ID through a computer, that person is checked against the lists.

“So if you are speeding, you get pulled over, they’ll query that name. And if they are encountering a known or suspected terrorist, it will pop up and say call the Terror Screening Center,” said Healy. “So now the officer on the street knows he may be dealing with a known or suspected terrorist.”

The center averages about 55 encounters a day from people who are known or suspected terrorists.

In most cases, according to Healy, the encounters do not produce arrests, but they do provide additional intelligence.

“[The] location of where the guy’s going. What he’s doing [and] additional associates that the subject is hanging around.”

Throughout the Terrorist Screening Center are placed artifacts from various terrorist attacks including Oklahoma City federal building, the USS Cole bombing, and the World Trade Centers. All sober reminders of how important their work is.

For Tim Healy and the workers of the Terrorist Screening Center, failure is not an option. They measure their success by what doesn’t happen.

*****

On September 16, 2003, the President signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 (HSPD-6), requiring the establishment of an organization to “consolidate the Government’s approach to terrorism screening and provide for the appropriate and lawful use of Terrorist Information in screening processes.” Specifically, the Attorney General was directed to create a new organization to consolidate terrorist watch lists and provide 24-hour, 7-day a week operational support for federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, and foreign government as well as private sector screening across the country and around the world. As a result of this presidential directive, the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) was created. As of the end of fiscal year (FY) 2004, the TSC was a $27 million organization with approximately 175 staff.

San Bernardino to New York: Deobandi Courtesy of Barack and Hillary

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Ahmad Rahami Posted Radical Videos in 2010, Went to Syria: Sources

   

Ahmad Khan Rahami spent time at Pakistan seminary tied to Taliban

Guardian: Exclusive: Suspect in New York and New Jersey bombings spent three weeks in 2011 at Kaan Kuwa Naqshbandi madrassa, source says, amid questions of terrorism links

Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of placing bombs in New York and New Jersey last weekend, spent time in a religious seminary in Pakistan closely associated with the Afghan Taliban, according to a government official.

The 28-year-old, who was born in Afghanistan but became a US citizen, spent time at the Kaan Kuwa Naqshbandi madrasa on his two visits to Pakistan, a security official working for the government of Balochistan province told the Guardian.

Rahami spent three weeks in 2011 receiving “lectures and Islamic education” at the school in Kuchlak, a dusty cluster of villages 20km north of Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, he said.

Kuchlak is a well-known hub for the Taliban, the Islamist movement that has waged a 15-year insurgency against local and Nato forces in nearby Afghanistan. It is home to many madrasas, the seminaries intimately linked with the Taliban, originally a movement of religious students.

US officials have revealed basic details about Rahami’s two visits to Pakistan, the first in 2011 when he spent a couple of months in Quetta and got married and almost a year in 2013 when he also made a car journey to Afghanistan.

But very little information has emerged from inside Pakistan about what Rahami did during his visits.

Related reading: U.S. State Dept/Pakistan Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

The government official, who did not wish to be named because he was speaking about a highly sensitive subject, said Pakistani security agencies have tried to “hide all the details of his visits to Quetta” and keep as much information as possible out of the media.

Rahami, he said, also visited other sensitive areas in the province, including Surkhab and Nushki, where former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor was killed by a US drone in May.

Pakistan has long been accused of playing a “double game” with the US, both supporting the Nato counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and allowing the Taliban to use its territory a vital rear base.

A western expert on the Taliban said Abdul Samad, the Afghan owner of the Kuchlack madrasa, was an important local figure.

“The madrasa is a place where you have multiple Afghan Taliban going there and hanging out in [Samad’s] court, as well as active ISI officers,” he said, referring to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, an army-run spy agency.

“Samad is the kind of person who should have been shut down long ago but enjoys a high degree of protection,” he said.

Despite being part of the mystical, Sufi strain of Islam, which many hardliners abhor, Samad is highly respected by the movement, he said.

A Karachi-based cleric told the Guardian the school was a sizeable operation, with more than 200 students.

Despite several attempts to reach Samad for comment, the Guardian was unable to make contact with the madrasa.

Although the Taliban’s leadership is often described as the “Quetta Shura” many analysts consider Kuchlak to be the actual command centre for many senior members of the movement.

The Taliban’s white flags have been reportedly seen flying in the town’s graveyards and Shahbaz Taseer, a Pakistani kidnapped by militants in Lahore in 2011 and held for more than four years, was released in Kuchlak in March by the Taliban.

Rahami’s father Mohammad Rahami has said his son had grown increasingly interested in Islamist movements, watching Taliban and al-Qaida videos, and listening to their poetry. Rahami had also shown sympathy towards the Taliban, a former employer said.

Related reading: San Bernardino/ The Islamic Center of Riverside or Brooklyn

Given the Taliban has long avoided entanglement in international jihad, insisting it is interested only in forcing foreign troops out of Afghanistan, it is unlikely Rahami was operating under instruction when he planted his bombs. A notebook found on Rahami when he was captured after a shootout on Monday suggests he may have been inspired by the Islamic State group.

But the claim Rahami attended an important Taliban-sympathising madrasa could be embarrassing for Pakistan at a time the country is under intense international criticism, not least from India, which accused Pakistan this week of hosting “the Ivy League of terrorism”.

Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, said that because more than 1 million Afghan refugees lived in the province it was “difficult to know what sort of activity is being conducted by some individuals”.

“Filtering out the terrorist influences in such a huge community is a very difficult task,” he said.

Nor could the government be expected to be aware of a US traveller such as Rahami, who has “deep links in the host community”.

“If he was not spotted by the CIA and FBI or Homeland Security, then this shows that it is really global problem,” he said.

*** The basis for the swap of the Taliban 5 out of Guantanamo for Bowe Bergdahl? It all seems Qatar was the core and interlocutor for the Taliban. Clinton and Obama managed the failed process.

Negotiations with the Taliban initiated by the United States were for getting all factions to talk to each other.  Why bother talking to the Taliban? The answer is that, as both President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear while I served as special representative, the war in Afghanistan is going to end politically and we would either shape that end or be shaped by it. If there is ever to be peace in Afghanistan, Afghans will need to talk to other Afghans about the future of Afghanistan. Since the Taliban today officially refuses to talk to Kabul’s representatives, getting to these talks might require a US effort to help open the door.

Those US-Taliban talks, which lasted from mid-2011 to March 2012, ultimately failed. While many details rightly remain classified, here are three of the lessons I learned sitting across the negotiating table from the Taliban that may be helpful to those who may seek to reopen the dialogue with them or others who need to talk to an insurgent group in some present or future conflict:

Set clear conditions and moral guidelines and stick to them. These need not be preconditions. Indeed, before talks with the Taliban began, Secretary Clinton made clear that while the US had no preconditions for talking to them, Washington would support reconciliation with only those insurgents who met three important end conditions: Break with al Qaeda, end violence, and live inside an Afghan Constitution that guarantees the rights of all individuals, especially women. Force must be backed by diplomacy, and diplomacy must be backed by force. Talking with the Taliban was part of the larger “diplomatic campaign” Secretary Clinton launched in 2011 to complement the military surge President Obama had ordered in 2009. This diplomatic campaign tried to harness all of the instruments of non-military power to support Afghanistan, such as development assistance, private-sector investment and support for civil society. As part of this effort, we organized international meetings in Istanbul, Bonn, Chicago and Tokyo, at which nations and international organizations pledged future political and material support for Afghanistan. These conferences were also designed to send the Taliban clear messages that the international community was committed to supporting Afghanistan beyond 2014. More here.

Last item of note: In part from Newsweek: The groups targeting the state follow the Deobandi interpretative tradition of Islam. This is important because this means that they share a significant common organizational infrastructure. For example, they rely on mosques and madrassas that adhere to the Deobandi tradition of Islam. When 9/11 happened and Pakistan was forced to work with the Americans, these Deobandi groups were furious. Many of these groups came to know Al-Qaeda through their association with the Taliban in Afghanistan. [The Afghan Taliban emerged from Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.] And these Deobandi groups were furious that the Pakistani state was aiding the overthrow, not only of the Taliban government, but the only government in the world that was exercising a Deobandi version of Sharia [Islamic law]. After 9/11…[some] of these Deobandi groups began fracturing and disobeying the [Pakistani] state. That’s when the insurgency began. Over time these Deobandi organizations began calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban.

9/11: POTUS Vetoed JASTA, Ability to Sue Saudi Arabia

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House intel chairman threatens to subpoena bin Laden files

FNC: The Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee says he’s prepared to take what may be unprecedented action to get the remaining Usama bin Laden documents from the nation’s top military and intelligence agencies – and subpoena the files.

“If they don’t provide these documents to the committee by October 11th, then we’re going to have to subpoena them — which I don’t want to have to do but it appears like we’ve run out of all options,” Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News. “For the administration to basically mislead the American people for this many years is flat-out wrong.”

Nunes is seeking documents and relevant analysis, which is thought to comprise at least 50 reports. In a Sept. 22 letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and Defense Department Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Nunes says the law required them to comply nearly two years ago based on Section 313 of the Intelligence Authorization ACT (IAA) for fiscal 2014. This section mandated a “complete declassification of the Abbottabad documents within 120 days.”  More here.

Meanwhile there appears to be enough votes to over-ride Obama’s veto on the ability to for the 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia.

FNC: With lawmakers eager to return home to campaign ahead of the November election, a vote could come as early as Tuesday. Even House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, an Obama ally, indicated support this week for an override, saying members believe the families “should have their day in court.”

Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called the veto a “disappointing decision that will be swiftly and soundly overturned in Congress.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office said the Senate would take up the override “as soon as practicable in this work period.”

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act sailed through both chambers of Congress by voice vote, with final House passage coming just two days before Obama led the nation in marking the 15th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. More here.

The passed legislation is known as JASTA, S.2040 – Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act was introduced by Senator Cornyn of Texas. It was presented to Barack Obama and was due for final record by 9/23/2016 if Obama did not take his veto action which he did at the last moment during the week of the United Nations General Assembly.

Related reading: House Intel Cmte has Declassified/Released the 28 Pages

Additionally:

Deleted official report says Saudi key funder of Hillary Clinton campaign

#USA2016

MEE: Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly said Saudi has enthusiastically funded Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign

Saudi Arabia is a major funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the next president of the United States, according to a report published by Jordan’s official news agency.

The Petra News Agency published on Sunday what it described as exclusive comments from Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which included a claim that Riyadh has provided 20 percent of the total funding to the prospective Democratic candidate’s campaign.

CIA, John Brennan, Gus Hall and that Polygraph Test

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This is the same guy who defended Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam’.

John Brennan: The President’s strategy is absolutely clear about the threat we face. Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear. Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children. More here.

CIA director fretted his vote for communist

CNN:John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?
“I froze,” Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference. “This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,”
Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.
The CIA director said the agency’s mission is to protect the values of the Constitution — which include free speech.
“We’ve all had indiscretions in our past,” he said, adding neither some drug experimentation nor activism was a non-starter. “I would not be up here if that was disqualifying.”
He proceeded to tell the story of his test.
“I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, ‘OK, here’s the choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko, or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'” Brennan said.
He said he chose to be forthcoming.
“I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I’m not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, ‘OK,’ and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, ‘Well, I’m screwed.'”
But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.

“So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, ‘I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall’ … and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that’s not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government.”
So, who was Gus?
Well he died in circa 2000 in New York and did run for president of the United States more than once.

By the end of his life he had become a lonely Communist stalwart in a post-Communist world. Those who sought him out for interviews at party headquarters on West 23rd Street in Manhattan found a genial white-haired man presiding over ”a museum of history,” as he put it. Pictures of his family shared space with a portrait of Lenin (a gift from Leonid I. Brezhnev); a wood sculpture from Fidel Castro and a tapestry of Karl Marx, courtesy of Erich Honecker, the former leader of East Germany.

”The struggle between those who own the wealth and those whose labor produces the wealth is one flaw in capitalism that will lead to socialism,” Mr. Hall said in 1996, repeating the familiar Marxist formulation.